21. When death cuts down someone in your family, carrying off the youngest before the oldest without discrimination, you are accustomed to say that God is not just: because He sacrifices he who is strong and has all his future before him, leaving those who have lived many years and are full of deceptions: because He takes those who are useful and leaves behind those who are no longer able to work: because He breaks the heart of a mother by depriving her of the innocent creature who was her only joy.

Humans, it is on this point that you must lift yourselves above commonplace thoughts about life in order to be able to understand that goodness is frequently where you judge there to be evil, and the wisdom of providence where you think you perceive the blind fatality of destiny. Why do you evaluate divine justice by you own ideas? Do you suppose that the Lord of the Worlds applies justice through mere caprice, in order to inflict cruel punishment? Nothing happens that has not an intelligent meaning and no matter what happens there is always a reason for it. If you scrutinize better all the pain that redounds to you then you would surely find divine reason, regenerating reason, wherein you would see the worthlessness of your interests which, as a consequence, would become so secondary as to be cast into last place.

Believe me, in the case of an incarnation of twenty years, death is preferable to any of the shameful dissipations which bring untold distress to respectable families, break the hearts of mothers and cause parents' hair to whiten before their time. Premature death is frequently a great blessing which God concedes to those who depart, so preserving them from the miseries of life or the seductions which possibly occasioned the loss of life. The person who dies in the flower of youth is not a victim of fate. God judges that it is not suitable for that person to remain longer on Earth.

What a terrible tragedy, you say, to see the thread of life that was so full of hope, cut! To what hope are you referring? That of the Earth? Where he who had gone could have perhaps shone or made his way and become rich? Always there is this restricted vision which prevents one from rising above that which is material. Who can tell what might have been the actual fate of that life which you thought so full of hope? How do you know that it would not have been saturated with bitterness? Do you then disdain the hopes offered by the future life, to the point of preferring this fleeting existence here on Earth? Do you suppose that a high position amongst men is worth more than an elevated place amongst the blessed Spirits?

Instead of complaining, rejoice when it pleases God to withdraw one of your children from this vale of miseries. Would it not be selfish to wish that they continue suffering at your side? Ah! This is the pain conceived by those lacking in faith, who see death as an eternal separation! But those of you who are Spiritists know that the soul lives better when it is separated from its material form. Mothers, know that your beloved children are near you, yes, very near. Their fluidic bodies embrace you, their thoughts protect you and the remembrances that you keep delight them with happiness; but your unreasonable pain afflicts them, because it reveals a lack of faith, so constituting a revolt against the Will of God.

Those of you who understand the meaning of spiritual life, listen to the beatings of your heart when calling to these loved ones. If you ask God to bless them, you will feel great consolation, the kind which will dry your tears; you will feel magnificent aspirations which will show you the future which our Supreme Lord has promised. - SAMSON, ex-member of the Spiritist Society of Paris, (1863).